For the record, your friends are extra silly. You know that self-employed people (selbständig) in Austria have social health insurance, pension, and even unemployment coverage?
My husband is selbständig and he even has a part-time employee, all without creating a GMBH. (Don't get me started on how GMBHs are superior to the American LLC!)
In the UK, the minimum contribution is around 20 euros per month. It gives you health coverage (no dental) and you are not forced to pay into the pensions system. In my view, the UK system is hugely more attractive for startups. Ireland is similar I believe.
To be "successful" for a one-man/woman show I'd argue that you need to earn at least €5k a month, after recurring costs for your business, but without taxes/insurance etc.
It's really not that hard to reach that level with the right idea, the right presumptions, lots of work and none of the excuses.
EDIT: Actually, when I first started being "selbstständig" back in 2004 and got a tax consultant, she asked me "how much do you plan to earn per month?", and I said "5000 euros"-- she thought it was a joke. Mindset problem.
The burn rate is very important initially. It can make or break a startup.
Maybe you should write them to tell them that it's not possible without $5,000 of funding for a summer.
On the balance, if you can't manage to figure out ways to save $5k for a summer yourself, you should seriously question whether you have the ability to run a business.
If you can't figure out how to pay for 250 euros a month - which you could earn each week as a dishwasher in Vienna, so it's not as if it's some vast sum - then you are similarly ill-equipped.
If you can't bear to give up one week of your time in order to spend the other 3 weeks on your huge future business, ditto.
By the way: I wrote an ebook to self-fund our work on Freckle and it earned us over $40k. It was sooooooo haaaaaaard. But even then, it was cream - not necessary. We could have kept working on it after hours for free, as we had been doing. It would have taken a bit longer, but so what?
What I'm saying is that paying 20 is more attractive than paying 250. And indeed, I cannot bear to give up 25% of my time just because some socialist government has decided to force me to save for retirement. I do not intend to retire. Ever.
If you don't want to support the socialist government, you should really move to the US.
Your argument has swung from "can't pay the costs" to "hate socialism," while also loving that you can only pay 20 euros a month for basic healthcare.
Which is it? Do you want a very socialist govt to pay 20 euros to? Or do you want none? Do you want health insurance? Or do you want none? Do you want funding so you can live off somebody else's investment in your business, or do you want to not have to pay anything?
a) I think low cost of living is important in the initial stages of a startup. The lower the better. Spending time on anything other than the startup is bad. Dishwasher or other salaries in Vienna are not particularly relevant to understand this principle. Therefore, the UK and Ireland are better places to start a startup than continental Europe.
b) If a significant part of the cost of starting a business comes from mandatory contributions to something I don't want and will never consume (i.e pensions), I get annoyed. You may not know that half of those 250 euros go into pensions and not health care. I want the health care part but I don't want to be forced into a pensions scheme. All contributions should be a share of the income people generate, not a set minimum fee. I have no idea whether that is socialist or not.
c) I'm not as anti-socialist as you might think. My opinion is that society needs to catch people who fall, for practical reasons as well as human dignity. Some things like health care, basic shelter and access to information need to be available to everyone. I don't believe that abject poverty makes people more entrepreneural. The biographies of successful people just don't support that claim. I am willing to pay a share of my income to cover the cost of helping those who cannot help themselves. Unfortunately, in Europe, the people who are best protected by this odd form of socialism are not the ones who have fallen but rather those close to government and traditional trade unions. They don't just cause unnecessary cost, they also create very inflexible rules that discourage self-employment and make it very expensive to hire people.
Having said that, I totally agree with you that none of that should deter anyone from starting a business wherever they may be.
My husband is selbständig and he even has a part-time
employee, all without creating a GMBH. (Don't get me
started on how GMBHs are superior to the American LLC!)
I don't think my talk would be welcome, or I would be given the cold shoulder, so I don't put myself through it.
>I don't think my talk would be welcome, or I would be given the cold shoulder, so I don't put myself through it.
Weird. Preach to the converted, much?
And as for preaching to the choir, no. If I were only interested in preaching to the choir, why would I bother to create a fairly controversial conference?
After all, the "accepted" startup model is building, growing huge, and hoping for an acquisition, rather than charging.
But preaching to people who really don't want to hear it - that's another story, and a total waste of time.
What you might be interpreting as disinterest in the subject of startups is more like to be a disinterest in the means by which you are preaching to the converted .. sure you're not just getting a negative personal response and broadly generalizing it to avoid discomfort?
Not everyone - but enough that I wouldn't bother trying to force my unwelcome ideas on people by giving a talk.
And yes, I'm positive it's not "a negative personal response." The people I have connected with clearly enjoy my company.
Some people I've met (like Paul Böhm, which IIRC is the founder of MetaLab) seem very much pro-startup, but it could be that my experience is not representative of the norm, as I am hardly a regular member.
It seems that there is a particular brand of arrogance required of anyone trying to get something new done in the world of The Mob Mind, and that Mob Mind may well already be on its way to agitation in the Metalab scene, with regards to startups .. However, that arrogance persists in the Metalab scene, in the form of others, in the wings, preparing their new ideas for delivery.